


the weight of water

by Siria



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The hell?" Danny said. "It's 24 degrees outside," which maybe wasn't the most diplomatic way to introduce yourself to a roommate, but it was January in Jersey and this guy was wandering around flaunting his calves. Danny's tact couldn't be expected to operate optimally in such conditions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the weight of water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [isle_girl808](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isle_girl808/gifts).



> Written for isle_girl808 for the Fandom Aid auction. Many thanks to dogeared for her beta help!

A silent residence hall was an eerie place. Danny stomped his feet against the entrance mat, shaking the snow mush from his boots, before shouldering his duffle bag again and picking up the last of the boxes. His solitary trip through the quiet halls was pretty different to how it had been when he'd first left home for college, when he'd been one of hundreds arriving and he'd had his dad there to help him haul his stuff in, his ma to oversee and cluck her tongue over the dorm room's ancient mattress. But that had been eighteen months, a couple of hundred miles and an entirely different university ago.

Now it was three days before the rest of the Rutgers student body was due to arrive back from winter break, and Danny was here by himself, toting his worldly belongings to room 114. The official reason was that it would give him extra time to make sure that all his transfer paperwork had gone through and his credits been applied before the semester began; the honest one was that he couldn't stand being in his parents' too-quiet house any longer, everyone constantly listening out for the phone or for a knock at the door that seemed less likely with each passing day.

Danny set the box down on top of the others when he reached the door of his room, then fumbled in the pocket of his jeans for the key. The woman at the student housing office had apologised for not being able to accompany him over, since she'd been the only one there this morning and couldn't leave things unattended. "But it's pretty self-explanatory," she'd said as she handed over the keys, a swipe card for access to the building and a welcome packet. "Your roommate should be back in the next couple of days and I'm sure he'll be happy to show you the ropes. If you run into any difficulties before then, the number for this office is on the first page of your welcome packet, feel free to call and ask for Jan."

"Pretty self-explanatory," Danny mumbled to himself when the door swung open and he saw the room for the first time.

It was maybe a little bigger than the twin he'd shared back in Boston, but the paint colour had clearly been decided on by a committee—it was an unattractive nothing that was not quite beige, not quite mustard, not quite grey. The furniture was sparse on his side of the room—a single bed, a tiny desk and a chair, all of it made from flimsy-looking wood—but honestly if Danny hadn't been told that he had a roommate, it would have been tough to guess. The other side of the room looked barely more inhabited. Its bed was made up, but the blue sheets were made with military precision, as if no one had ever slept in them, and the matching desk held only a neatly arranged chemistry textbook and a copy of Merriam-Webster.

"Clearly I got put in the fun room," Danny told himself as he dumped the first box on his bed. But hey, if it did turn out that he'd be spending a semester living with a science-inclined non-entity, that mightn't be such a bad idea. Danny'd already had more than enough excitement this past year.

Danny spent the rest of that day unpacking, and the following day dealing with paperwork. Some of it had indeed gone astray between Massachusetts and New Jersey, thank you so much USPS for your consideration, which made him glad he'd thought to bring some extra copies of his transcripts with him. Making it through freshman comp, intro to calculus and a pottery class had been bad enough once—Danny had no desire to repeat the process. Apart from that, settling in went pretty smoothly, and the campus itself was quiet underneath a blanket of snow that had been renewed overnight.

The stillness lulled him, and left Danny completely unprepared for what he found when he got back to the dorm. A couple of people had started to trickle back, and Danny encountered a few curious faces in the hallway, which meant that he wasn't hugely surprised to see the door to his room standing open. It _was_ , however, a surprise to be greeted by the strains of Dr Hook—surely one of the least palatable musical exports of the great state of New Jersey—pouring tinnily from a CD player and the sight of someone's shorts-clad ass bent over a bulging suitcase.

"The hell?" Danny said. "It's 24 degrees outside," which maybe wasn't the most diplomatic way to introduce yourself to a roommate, but it was January in Jersey and this guy was wandering around flaunting his calves. Danny's tact couldn't be expected to operate optimally in such conditions.

The guy straightened up, and up, and turned around so that Danny could see that hey, he'd apparently been housed with an underwear model or something: tanned and smiling and holding out his hand for Danny to shake. "Oh hey, brah, I just got a heads-up about you," he said, just a hint of an accent in his voice. "You must be Daniel."

"Danny, please. I'm only Daniel to my Grandma Lil," Danny said, shuddering with memories of seders past. "Nice to meet you, uh…"

"Steve, Steve McGarrett," and he was nothing at all like Danny had expected from the crisply folded bed sheets, the tidy textbooks. For all that Danny was a criminal justice major, he was maybe not so hot yet on the profiling. "The RA said you just transferred here?"

"Yeah," Danny said, shrugging. He'd been dreading this part, having to face people's questions. "Did my first year in Boston, had to take last semester out, and then I wanted to be closer to my folks, so." He shrugged again, awkwardly aware that he sounded stilted and that from here to Philadelphia, people were clutching their chests in shock at the fact that here was Danny Williams, unwilling to talk, but what the hell. These past few months had been a time of firsts, after all.

Steve looked at him for a moment, his expression keen and assessing and at odds with the relaxed slant of his shoulders, but he didn't push Danny at all. "Cool. E komo mai."

Danny squinted at him, baffled. "What, New Brunswick has its own little slang dialect or something going on?" Who knew the fifty-minute drive from Weehawken would put you in a whole new linguistic world?

Steve grinned.

And that was how Danny met Steve.

 

*****

Danny was focused on polishing off the last of his gen ed requirements and settling back into college life, and Steve's classes that semester were all for his double major in chemistry and Chinese, so they didn't share any of the same courses. In fact, between Steve getting up at dawn every day to run a frankly disgusting number of miles before class—even on the weekend, which Danny regarded as a minor form of sacrilege—and Danny's afternoons taken up with classes and a job at a bookstore near campus, they didn't even see one another that much.

Steve might have dressed like the slacker offspring of one of the Beach Boys, but his initial neatness hadn't just been a product of him bringing most of his stuff back to Hawaii with him for the winter break. "Can't help it," he'd said cheerfully when Danny'd cocked an eyebrow at him about the way he made his bed each and every morning before setting out on his run. "Dad and grandfather both in the service, years in the boy scouts, in ROTC… it's probably genetic at this point."

"Yeah, well, my ethnic heritage's mostly sloth," Danny said, burrowing further down under his blankets, "so just make sure you close the door on your way out, mmkay?"

Steve snored a little when he slept, particularly on Thursdays because his schedules on those days would make a grown man's eyes water—Danny knew what he was talking about, he'd seen Steve's planner and you could keep your cracks about growth spurts to yourself, okay. He had a terrible tendency to put pineapple on most things he ate, he supported all the wrong teams, and his taste in music tended towards truly abysmal power ballads, but Steve was funny and focused and continued to be aesthetically pleasing. As roommates went, Steve wasn't so bad.

Though Danny revised that assessment upwards to best roommate, _awesome_ roommate, the first day of Spring Break when Steve closed the door behind him and opened a bag to reveal that he'd smuggled in what looked like half a liquor store. Danny couldn't afford to go away for the week, and didn't want to go home, so he'd just been planning to spend the break chugging coffee and getting ahead on some of his assignments. Steve, it seemed, had different ideas.

"I thought you Navy boys were all, you know…" Danny took one of the beers that Steve held out to him. "My body is my temple, out demon drink, blah blah."

"One night off never hurt anyone," Steve said with a grin, twisting off the cap of his own bottle and taking a healthy swig.

"Huh," Danny said, eyeing the quality of that smile. "And by one night off, you mean…"

"Spring Break, Danny, live a little."

With almost everyone else cleared out for the week, even if it was just to the exotic climes of the bars along the Jersey Shore, they pretty much had the dorms to themselves. The quiet halls around them reminded Danny a little of those first few days, lonely and by himself and aching from not knowing what to do. But the snow was finally starting to recede from campus, Steve turned out to have a pretty sly sense of humour and knew some of the best dive bars around campus, and he saved the best bottle of whiskey for Saturday.

"Saturday night to enjoy it," he'd said firmly as he led Danny up the stairs to the roof of the dorm building. "Sunday to get over the hangover, Monday we're back to class." They weren't supposed to be up there, but there was no RA around to yell at them, and there was a spot tucked in next to one of the laundry room vents that was warm and sheltered and had a great view out over the campus.

"This more of that military tactical stuff, huh?" Danny said, eyeing the glasses as Steve poured out the first shots. Definitely more than a finger's worth in there.

"Something like that," Steve said, grinning.

Neither of them were up to much tactical thinking by the time they'd made it halfway through the bottle, slumped warm and companionable against one another under the darkening sky. Danny was trying his best to recount this awesome play he'd seen the last Jets game he'd been at, but he couldn't seem to remember the name of the thing the players carried—little bit round but a lot smushed—and Steve kept giggling because he couldn't get his tongue to work properly.

The best he could make of Danny's name was "Danno," which was somehow the most hilarious thing Steve had ever heard. He was giggling and repeating it in various tones and pitches, high and low. "Danno. Dannooooo. Hi, Danno."

Danny sort of liked it. His tongue felt numb. He closed one eye and peered down the neck of the whiskey bottle. "This whiskey, this is dangerous whiskey, Steve. Where'd'you get this whiskey?"

"S'Hawaiian whiskey," Steve said. His eyes were closed and his head was resting against Danny's shoulder, and this close to him Danny couldn't see the spit-shined ROTC cadet at all.

Danny blinked. "They make whiskey on Hawaii?"

"Nuh uh," Steve said, eyes flying open, "nope, no, just, well yes, but you can't get okolehao here so like…" He swept one arm out to indicate the bottle and almost tipped it all over Danny's pants. "This is as kama'aina as you can get on the mainland. I miss home. I wish my dad had never sent me away."

Steve clammed up right then, like he hadn't planned on letting that last bit slip; the loose lines of his body turned stiff next to Danny, as if all the alcohol had suddenly turned to ice in his veins.

And Danny knew that feeling, knew what it was like to have your goofy ole heart betray you and leave you breathless, aching, so he told Steve what he hadn't told anyone outside his parents and his sisters and two grim-faced FBI agents. "My kid brother Matty—Matthew—he, uh, he got in with a bad crowd last year. Did some stuff, bad stuff, not the kind of stuff where they just say kids will be kids or give you a couple months in juvie, scare you straight. That's where I was last semester. Helping my folks look for him, but we never found him and I swear my da's hair turned grey overnight."

For a while, the only sound was distant traffic and the dull hum of one of the heating units clicking on, but for some reason Danny didn't find the near silence uncomfortable. It should have been awful, to own up to what Matty had done, but talking about it had actually made him feel a little better. He sighed.

"More whiskey?" Steve said eventually.

"Fill 'er up," Danny said grimly, holding out his glass. "To the brim, my friend."

He regretted saying that the next morning—accepted the glass of water and two little pills Steve held out to him with a grateful groan—but he didn't regret anything else.

 

*****

After that week, they hung out together more often—met up for lunch on the days when their schedules allowed it, and every now and then went to parties thrown by some buddies of Steve's who'd rushed a frat. The parties were inevitably loud and raucous and nothing like what Danny had expected from the movies he'd watched back in high school, at once more boring and wilder, and always the better for having walked in with Steve at his side.

Sometimes they found themselves taking neighbouring seats in the library when they were working on papers. Steve was a good study buddy to have—quiet, focused, and whenever Danny took a quick break from writing to shake out his cramped hand, he was reliably entertained by the faces Steve tended to make at his textbooks. What a chapter on molecular whatchamacallits had ever done to a person to make him flare his nostrils like that, Danny didn't know, but the effects were undeniably hilarious.

In early April, Danny drove them to the nearest mall. Steve needed a birthday present for his little sister, and had somehow coaxed Danny into going with him, saying that there was no way he could brave Contempo Casuals alone.

"And you," Danny said, as he swung his car out onto the road from the parking lot, "you want to go into combat, like, going up against guys with guns, big guns, but you can't face the thoughts of a group of high school girls, no wait, what am I saying, I've got sisters, I know from this, we should probably go in armed. Do we have an extraction plan?"

Steve snickered almost the whole way there. It took them three hours to navigate the mall, find something for Mary—when quizzed about her taste, the best Steve could do was wrinkle his nose and say "Picky? She likes colours?", which Danny pointed out was exactly the kind of attention to detail that the Navy looked for in its officers—buy something for Mary, have the sales assistant wrap said thing for Mary, avoid getting run over by a horde of people heading for a department store sale, and collapse at the food court with two extra-large orders of fries and a soda as big as Danny's head.

"You, my friend," Danny said, gesturing at Steve with a fry, "you owe me big-time. I think that grandma in that last place was going to shank me."

"Eh," Steve said grinning, "you loved it."

"Maybe," Danny said, ducking his head because suddenly, inexplicably, he could feel his cheeks heat.

 

*****

And it wasn't that Danny had ever been blind to the fact that Steve was attractive—Danny had eyes that worked just fine, 20/20 vision thanks so much, and Steve had abs you could bounce a quarter off—but as the last of the snow slowly melted from campus, Danny slowly started to realise that he was attracted to Steve. Danny had made a couple of friends since he'd transferred here—people he'd chat with before lectures, or grab lunch with, or even go out with every now and then—but Steve was the only one he felt comfortable enough around to tell him about Matty.

It may have taken alcohol to get Danny to open up in the first place, but even once he'd sobered up, he'd risked saying a couple of things every now and then and Steve… Steve got it. That was as much a worry as a relief, because Danny realised he was starting to develop some kind of Steve-related sixth sense: like how he'd know when Steve had come into a room without even having to look, like how he'd always seem to find himself oriented towards Steve no matter where they were. Danny couldn't remember ever feeling this in sync with someone before,

Steve seemed oblivious to it, even though Danny caught himself staring more than once, and was starting to find Steve's daily showers—when he'd come back to their room still damp and wearing nothing more than a towel, hair curling wet at the nape of his neck—a new kind of torture.

One evening, Steve came in wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and a pair of board shorts, his bare feet long and strangely delicate-looking. Danny couldn't take it any more and grabbed a bunch of quarters from his laundry jar and went down to the pay phones in the front hall to call Carrie.

"You're my big sister!" he hissed when she huffed down the phone line at him. "Aren't you supposed to be giving me advice here, telling me it's going to be okay?"

"We're Irish, Danny," she said, sounding just as indifferent as she had the day he'd screwed up his courage and first told someone that maybe he liked boys as much as he liked girls. "We're genetically inclined to pessimism. Also it's ten on a Sunday night. I have no life-changing advice to give at ten on a Sunday night."

Danny rested his head against the side of the phone and groaned. "Car. I just caught myself thinking that his little toes were cute."

For a long moment, the only sound was the low hiss of static over the phone line and Carrie's measured exhale. "Little toes are serious, Danny," she said eventually.

"Hence," Danny said, as slowly, as patiently as he knew how, "my _point_."

 

*****

Carrie drove up from Philadelphia the next weekend. Danny hadn't seen her since all the stuff had gone down with Matty. Her hair was a little shorter and a lot darker and she'd taken to wearing heels that left her towering over him, but otherwise she was just the same: his big sis Carrie, now Caroline S. Williams, Attorney-at-Law and probably the scariest woman Danny knew, after his Ma.

Carrie cast a sceptical eye over his hastily tidied dorm room—like she just knew that if she got down on her knees and peered under the bed she'd find all the laundry he hadn't had time for in the past few weeks—but let him usher her out for a whistle-stop tour of the campus without protest. She took him out grocery shopping on Saturday and paid for everything and his lunch, despite all his protests, and didn't say one word to him about Matty or Steve, for which he was very grateful.

Sunday, of course, things were different. Steve got back from whatever ROTC training thing called him away all Saturday, and Danny didn't like the assessing look Carrie gave him when she shook hands with Steve, not one little bit. Steve, at least, proved that he had at least one ounce of self-preservation in his body because he looked rightfully nervous. "Hrm," was all she said in response to Steve's greeting.

Steve glanced over at Danny, seeming a bit bewildered—probably wasn't used to getting that kind of reaction when he was in uniform or at all, the unfairly attractive giraffe—and Danny could do nothing more than shrug in response. Mysterious unto him were the ways of Carrie.

The three of them went out for dinner at a nearby diner once Steve had changed into civvies, and Carrie was weirdly alert and observant the whole way through the blue-plate special, a slice of pie, a cup of coffee, like at any moment Danny was expecting her to jump up and yell, "I object!" She peppered Steve with questions which he answered with a patience that was a little surprising to Danny, who had seen the guy get twitchy if the front door of the library was opened two minutes behind schedule.

Carrie walked with them back to campus, and when Steve said goodnight and went on into the dorms, she seized Danny by the elbow.

"Ow, Carrie, jesus," he hissed, trying and failing to pull away. "You know you can cause nerve damage with those nails of yours, right?"

"Go for it," she said imperiously, as if she hadn't heard a word he'd said. "You wanted my advice, baby brother, and I'm giving it to you. You're worrying about nothing. Jump his bones. He's totally into you."

"Hey, hey, keep your voice down!" Danny said, looking around nervously because having it get around campus that he was hot for his male roommate, not necessarily something that he was looking for at this moment in time. Not when he wanted to be a cop and Steve wanted to go into the Navy and there had never, ever been any hint that Steve wanted him back.

Carrie rolled her eyes. "No one is paying us any attention. Speaking of, what did Steve say when I asked him what his plans were for the summer?"

"I…" Danny said. "Uh…"

"See," Carrie said, "you could maybe have answered that if you hadn't spent most of meal staring at him and not listening to a word I said."

Danny felt himself blanch. What if Steve had—

"Don't worry," Carrie said wryly. "He was far too busy staring at your hands to notice. Go on, go talk to him, make with your face on his face." She mushed her two fists together in a way that frankly didn't speak much to her kissing skills. "Just this once, Danny, take a chance." Her expression softened, and she leaned in to buss him on the cheek. "

Danny licked at lips that were suddenly dry. What the hell—he could man up for ten minutes and if Steve freaked out or said no or punched him or whatever, well, it wasn't that long til the end of the semester, just a couple of weeks to finals. If it all went wrong, there would be a new roommate next semester and it was a big university; they might not even have to bump into one another ever again. "Okay," he said, and hugged Carrie once, fiercely, before turning and jogging up the steps and into the dorm.

He was rehearsing what he wanted to say as he opened the door, determined to march right to their room and lay out his case, put everything on the line—but there was Steve, sitting on the floor by the phones, back against the wall. He had a phone receiver clutched in one hand and a calling card in the other. There was a white, drawn look on his face, the kind of expression Danny hadn't seen anyone wear since things had first gone down with Matty—the kind of expression that he'd seen staring back at him from the mirror, then.

"Steve?" Danny said softly, going over to sit next to him on the floor. He wanted to reach out to touch him, rest a hand on Steve's arm or hug him, because Steve looked brittle, fragile, like he was about to vibrate apart at any moment. "What happened?"

"There was a note for me when I got back," Steve said, staring unseeing at the far wall, "telling me to call my folks. My dad… my dad said…" His throat worked; his eyes were wet. "Shit." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and those were definitely tears now. Danny sent out a collective telepathic _oh fuck it all_ to the universe, and pulled Steve into a hug: the tightest, fiercest hug he knew how to give. It probably should have been awkward, the two of them sitting on the battered, faded carpet, wrapped around one another while passers by gave them odd looks and Danny tried not to think about how ten minutes ago, he'd been hoping that maybe he'd get to end the evening by making out with Steve.

When Steve's sobs finally quietened, he pulled away and tugged the hem of his t-shirt up to rub tears and snot from his face. "Sorry, man, I shouldn't have done that."

"Hey," Danny said, gently like you would to an animal that had been spooked. He kept one hand on Steve's back, rubbing circles in the hope he was being soothing. "Hey, you never gotta apologise for that. You need to let it out, you let it out. You telling me there's no Hawaiian proverb for that, huh?"

Steve let out a funny sound that was half laugh, half sob, and sagged further into Danny's side. "It's my mom. Turns out she… I don't know. Dad didn't say everything and I don't think he knows half the shit she pulled either but there was an explosion and she's gone on the run and…" Steve looked down at his hands, clenched and twisting in his lap. "The CIA told my dad she could be charged with treason."

Danny blinked, and then said, "Holy shit," because what the hell else could you say to something like that? He'd thought maybe someone was sick, maybe there'd been a car accident, but not that Steve was about to one up him in the 'family members who've made seriously dubious life choices' department.

"I'll have to go home," Steve said. "My dad's going to call the airline, get me a flight tomorrow or Tuesday. They… there's going to be interviews, investigations. He sounded… Dad said they said her name wasn't even Doris. I don't even know my mom's name, Danny. Fuck, I didn't know her at all."

For a moment, Danny was back on that sidewalk in Weehawken, yelling after Matt while Matt flipped him off and then climbed into the back of that scumbag Giordano's car. The last time he'd seen his baby brother—the sidewalk summer-hot beneath his feet and the taste of bile in the back of his throat. He hadn't known what to say to his parents then, and he didn't know what to say to Steve now—he didn't think that there were any words that would make it better. Danny just wrapped his arms around Steve and sat there, holding him close.

*****

The CIA, it turned out, couldn't care less about interviewing the teenage son of the woman called Doris McGarrett, not once they found the cubbyhole of microfilm she'd kept hidden beneath the floor of her dining room. Steve told Danny about it in fits and starts, in between the both of them taking finals and Steve spending a lot of time on the phone with who the hell knew, saying 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.' It was like Danny had woken up all of a sudden in a spy movie, and he said as much when he got back from his last final to find Steve sitting on the edge of his bed, holding a sheaf of official-looking papers in his hands.

Steve just snorted, which made Danny knew it must be bad—as a crack, that hadn't been funny at all.

"They want more statements?" Danny said, sitting down next to him.

"No." Steve cleared his throat. "I, uh. Given the national security risk posed by my mother, it's been suggested that I resign from the ROTC program because giving me a commission would be unwise."

Danny stared. "That is _bullshit_."

He knew how much Steve had wanted to be the third generation of McGarretts in the Navy, how gutted he'd been to miss out on a spot at Annapolis, how much of himself he'd poured into the ROTC program here. Danny looked at the frozen, miserable expression on Steve's face and thought about all those cold mornings Steve had clambered out of bed before dawn because he'd thought it would all be worth it, and it made his heart break a little.

Some impulse propelled him, and Danny said, "That is _bullshit_ " again, ripping the papers out of Steve's hands and tossing them to the floor before leaning in and kissing Steve. The angle was awkward and Danny didn't quite know what to do with his mouth, his hands, was fully anticipating that Steve was going to pull back right away. But he didn't—he made a noise but then he was clutching at Danny, kissing him back with a heat and a fervour that startled Danny as much as it delighted him.

It took a while for Danny to be able to focus on anything other than the sensation of Steve's mouth against his, the hot skin under his hands, the heft of Steve's body when he slowly bore Danny down against the mattress. But then he realised what Steve was saying, a steady stream of "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," that had fury lighting up Danny's system as quick as adrenaline.

"This isn't your fault," he said fiercely, "it's not," tugging Steve's t-shirt up and over his head and finally getting his hands on the smooth planes of Steve's back. "I know, I see you," because he did, he saw Steve's big heart and how much he wanted to matter, how desperately he wanted to be good enough, and Danny felt his breath hiccup in his chest because holy shit, he didn't just like Steve: he was in love with him.

Danny clutched him close with desperate, wide-spread palms when he came.

*****

Summer was a long time spent apart—Danny living back at his parents' place and working a couple of part-time jobs, Steve back in Honolulu and doing some internship his father had arranged for him—especially when the cost and the time difference meant they could snatch only two quick phone calls. Danny took to letter writing with a gusto that would have made his high school English teacher's eyebrows raise, covering pages with his scrawl about weird customers and trips into the city and the shit his Uncle Sal said.

Steve mostly sent him postcards, technicolour snapshots of Hawaii that Danny stuck up on the wall over his bed, sounding out unfamiliar place names that seemed like they were too full of vowels to be real. The messages tended to be brief—"Doing fine, weather good" in Steve's spiky handwriting—but Danny didn't mind. He cared even less about brevity when an actual letter arrived in the mail for him one day and he opened it to find that Steve had written only three words on the page.

Danny folded the letter up carefully and kept it in his wallet the whole rest of the summer. He kept it there when he went back to college in the fall; when the two of them walked across the stage to accept their diplomas with their fractured families applauding in the audience; when they packed up their stuff and moved thousands of miles away because that was what felt right.

"Welcome to HPD, Officer Williams, Officer McGarrett," Captain Kelly said when he handed their badges over to them at the end of training, both of them standing straight-backed and proud. The letter was still in Danny's wallet then, but later that evening when they stumbled into their apartment, tipsy and laughing, Danny dug it out and handed it over to Steve.

Steve looked down at the page, the edges of it worn smooth with age and the countless times it had been opened and refolded. "Love you, you big lug," Danny said as he watched Steve stick the letter to the front of their fridge with a magnet.

Danny could see how the past couple of years had left their mark on Steve, in the premature silver hairs that were scattered around his temples, but there were laughter lines around his eyes, too—and the two of them together had always been better than not. If this was Danny's happy ever after, well. He'd take it.


End file.
